If you can say one thing about my husband Joe and me, it’s that we don’t sweat the small stuff. We know that stuff happens and if a hotel screws up, we’re not going to make a huge fuss over a minor inconvenience.
That being said, during our recent stay at the Moxy Times Square, we just couldn’t help but laugh at the mistake after mistake after mistake that happened in just the first 12 hours of staying there.
We were familiar with the brand, as we had stayed at the Moxy Phoenix/Tempe/ASU Area several years ago. So we knew the brand was aimed at a demographic that we are…not. Read: young and modern, with a minimalistic flair that includes only hooks for hanging clothes. But despite being a few decades older than most of the other guests, we thoroughly enjoyed our stay at the Moxy in Arizona and looked forward to visiting the NYC outpost.
Joe already told you about the first room they tried to give us, which really was the smallest hotel room I’ve ever seen. I had stayed at a hotel in Tokyo in the early 90s that I think was about 10 feet by 20 feet and I thought it was tiny. That was nothing compared to this room, which I think was about 8 feet by 16 feet, TOPS. (at one point, Moxy hotels were sometimes being used as crash pads for airline crew; we mused if this had been a crash pad room, once upon a time).
But we got out of staying in that room, because of a technicality – our description of our room said we would have a desk and chair and this room didn’t have one (*cough* there wasn’t even room for one *cough*). We regularly use a desk at hotels because we’re doing stuff for this blog, so a lack of same was going to be a problem. So we got a bigger room.
Our new room wasn’t much bigger – maybe 8 feet by 20 feet? But that little bit of extra space made all the difference in the world. You can see Joe’s review here.
Screw up #1
After we settled into the room, Joe had to do some blog stuff. Unfortunately, although there was a “Murphy desk” (think Murphy bed but a small desk that would come out of the wall), there was no chair.
You might wonder how a chair just disappears from a hotel room. Welp, remember that this was a Moxy hotel – practically everything gets hung on those hooks that are across one wall.
That includes the chairs, LOL! It was a folding chair that could be hung, so someone just took it, I guess to use in another room?
Anyway, so we called, and someone came to our room with a chair for our Murphy desk.
Screw up #2
We didn’t notice the second screw-up until the following day. After I took a shower, I grabbed the hair dryer (well, what I thought was the hair dryer), which was in a wire basket under the sink.
If you take a good look at that photo, you may say to yourself, “That’s a weird looking hair dryer.” And when I went to use it, I thought the same thing. It turns out it wasn’t a hair dryer – it was a clothes steamer.
WHAT?
So I called the front desk, explained that our room had a clothes steamer instead of a dryer and could they please bring up a hair dryer? About 20 minutes later, someone came with one. I thanked them, closed the door and went to plug it in, when….guess what?
Screw up #3
They had given me a hair dryer with a foreign plug.
I’m not sure if the hair dryer needed an E outlet (used in France, Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Tunisia and Morocco) or an F one (typically used in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Eastern Europe), but it certainly wasn’t going to work in a US type A or B plug.
There was no way I was going to be able to explain this one, so I went downstairs and talked to a girl at the front desk. I explained the situation and showed her the not-a-type A or B plug. If someone could look embarrassed and amused at the same time, that’s how she looked.
Anyway, she gave me another hair dryer, and things went fine from then on.
3 fails in 12 hours
So yeah…3 fails in about 12 hours.
Again, none of these issues were big. We had no intention of asking for compensation, asking to speak to the manager, etc. If nothing else, it just made us chuckle and shake our heads that so many things could happen in half a day.
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